The flight was uneventful, just the way I like it. Before boarding, they wanted to see the passports and the expiry date of my passport was brought up, but luckily another steward knew that for UK you don’t need a passport which is valid six months after the trip – mine will expire in December (and my next passport will be Swedish!).

Arrived in Edinburgh ahead of time and met the other travellers at the car rental while waiting for Magnus. Nice group, this will be a good trip!

The day was sunny and warm (almost 15 degrees) but we spent it in the car driving to Isle of Skye, and reached the hotel after sunset.

It was interesting to see the landscape in Scotland. The mountains are higher than I expected, in relative terms. The peaks were drove by were all sub-1000m but I had a hard time deciding if they look bigger or smaller than the mountains I’m used to. I finally realised that they look big because we’re driving so close to them – at home we have a much bigger distance between the road and the mountain. Another thing that at first look makes the mountains look really high is there are no trees on top of them, even though they are not high enough to be tundra. At the same time, there is a lot of forest but it’s all fake. So I think that once upon a time, the mountains were covered in trees but it was all cut down, and now they have planted these dense spruce forests that have such sharp borders that it screams cultivation. You can sometimes even see the neat rows of the plants.

When you get to the lochs, and along the sea, the landscape looks a lot like in Norway. The overall impression is that this is a blend of Iceland, Norway and a little bit of Sweden. The vegetation consists mostly of ferns and heather, with grass in between for the sheep to graze. Now in November, the ferns have withered brown and the heather is over bloom, so the prevalent colour is brown. But in those places which are mostly covered in grass which is still green, the mountains look strikingly like those in Iceland (complete with numerous sheep). And when the mountains are rugged and rise directly from the sea with waterfalls falling from the heights, you could as well be driving by a fjord in Norway. And when you’re driving through a place with no forest in sight, it’s not unlike driving the Wilderness Road in Sweden. But put it all together, and you get something with distinctly its own character – this is Scotland!